


Bugaboo

by sunlight_moonlight



Category: Suspiria (2019)
Genre: Being Accosted by Dead Dancers in Your Dreams, Gen, Ghosts, Haunting, Late Night Writing, Sleep Paralysis, Witches, google translate russian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-11
Updated: 2020-03-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:28:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23103226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunlight_moonlight/pseuds/sunlight_moonlight
Summary: During an episode of sleep paralysis, Elizabeth Tanner is visited by a very uninvited guest.
Kudos: 3





	Bugaboo

Elizabeth Tanner was experiencing sleep paralysis.

This wasn't an abnormal occurrence, especially not in this place, but that didn't make it any less inconvenient. It had gotten old by now, very old, and she was now an old hand at it, just like her sisters. There were many energies that congregated here, energies from magic, caused by magic, killed by it; spirits and entities of varying ranks swarmed, taking different forms and functioning on differing levels of sentience. They simply manifested and then existed in whatever way they could. Naturally, the conglomerate of all of these things in one building led to all sorts of strange and unsettling phenomena, especially during sleep.

Elizabeth sighed through her nose and squinted her eyes open as far as they would go. As usual, her limbs were unmoving, heavy like bricks on the bed, and she could not move them at all. Her breathing was steady and steep. She huffed another sigh, frustrated. She had gone so long without an episode, and generally at this point it irritated her more than it had _ever_ startled her--she would much prefer to be asleep right now, not having it be interrupted by useless visions from a malfunctioning in her brain or the silhouettes of long-dead people standing still and hazy at the end of her bed for fifteen minutes. There was nothing she could do except wait it out, though, and so she would.

She moved her eyes around the dark bedroom, looking for any shapes or figures in her line of sight. Maybe she could try to urge it along some, encourage it to come and go a little faster so that she could just go back to sleep.

As if on cue, something moved in her peripheral. She locked her gaze on it firmly, thinking,  _ Come on. Get this over with, please. _

The shape shifted again and, in a move that was simultaneously unusual and not, it seemed to follow along the line of the shadows against the wall. It was strange because she could almost see it moving, its legs, watching its abdomen move, but it also seemed as if it blended into the darkness and then reappeared on the other side of the room. There was a clean bar of light from her window that interrupted the dark, and Elizabeth distinctly did not see the figure move in front. Well, this was going far more quickly than she was expecting, at least. If she could've smirked, she would've. But then something different happened.

The eyes on the figure suddenly came into vision in a way that was impossible, because there was no viable light source going towards them. She couldn't see their color from where she was, but they were white and clearly human. They stared at her intensely, and something about it was disquieting. This certainly...wasn’t usual.

A strangely muted mixture of sounds began to hum in the air around Elizabeth's ears, and she couldn't identify where it was coming from. She looked around again, but her attention was quickly stolen as a louder noise breathed throughout her bedroom, one that came directly from the figure itself. It was, literally, like a hissing breath. It was light, cold and airy, and then the eyes began to grow closer to her. She watched apprehensively. No, something wasn't right. She  _ knew  _ who this was. As the figure, the spectre, drew nearer, she had her suspicions confirmed. It passed through the beam of light shining against the wall and the older woman could not deny the build of her visitor's face, the darkened wavy hair falling partially over her shoulder, the swollen jaw. Elizabeth tensed up with a mixture of outrage and perturbation.

The expression that Olga wore, as the light illuminated her, was very clearly one of lividity. Her eyes were wired, wide and manic, lips pulled ever so slightly too tight. She did not blink. As she reached the very foot of the matron's bed, Elizabeth could see how oddly discolored the once-student's skin still was, looking sort of blue in the nighttime. Her jaw was puffy but seemingly back in place, her ribcage looked normal enough, none of her hook wounds remained and her nose was clean. Odd thing, the afterlife was. Olga lowered her head slightly, boring holes into the other woman's face as she stared. Elizabeth was feeling it a lot more than she would've liked.  
"Hello again, Miss Tanner," Olga said, voice echoing hoarsely.  
_What are you doing here?_ Elizabeth asked, accusatory, through her mind. She knew Olga could hear it. _What could have possibly compelled you to show your face up here again?  
_"I can breathe again," was Olga's response, breathy and ghostly. Her dark lips pulled into a soft smile as she gestured towards herself. "And I hate you. For as long as I can breathe, I will _always_ come back to hate you."  
Elizabeth rolled her eyes in her stationary head. _Oh, please,_ she chided, wanting to grimace, _I am hated by many. Do you think there is a bone in my body that cares? I am especially unbothered by_ you _hating me, Olga. Believe that.  
_"Oh, I do, but I'm not worried about what you think." Olga lifted a leg and placed her knee on the bed. Tanner would've jolted if she could've; she was thoroughly, genuinely unimpressed with Olga's antics, but that didn't mean that she wasn't still jarred by the woman's sudden appearance. She was used to some of the coven's past victims appearing in her dreams and sleep paralysis episodes, but never like this. Never speaking so clearly, never looking right at her, never as _aware_. She didn't like it, at all. She wasn't even sure how Olga was _able_ to appear to her...the death she and the other two girls were granted seemed far more permanent, far more serious than any that the rest of the coven could've given them. Mother Suspiriorum herself had placed that kiss.

Olga's grin didn't falter. In fact, she may have been able to even sense the inherent apprehension that Elizabeth felt, because while she did not continue to climb onto the bed, she left her leg where it was. _You don't like that,_ her voice echoed in Elizabeth's head, and Elizabeth's face burned with anger. If she could shoot up out of this bed right now--how could Olga do that?  
Olga laughed, a sinister noise that she had never made while alive. Her grin became more sour the longer that the witch had to look at it; it disgusted her. "Oh, don't worry," the dead woman cooed, shaking her head, a movement and gaze that reeked of feigned kindness. "I'm mad, too. I am very mad. That's why I'm here."  
_And what do you think you will do, hm?_ Elizabeth challenged. She was fed up with this complete and utter idiocy. _What can you do as a ghost caught between life and death with no power? Infiltrate my dreams and attempt to scare me?_ She was sure to speak with the utmost disdain, in the most trivializing, patronizing way she could muster. Who did Olga think she was, after having been brutalized so badly by the coven? She’d gotten her punishment; how did she still have the audacity? She was dead, and she ought to know her place. Olga said something rather confounding next, though.

"Dreams," she stated, rubbing her hands together, the idle habit she'd often adopted in her daily life. "How much of this is a dream to you, Elizabeth? Right now? How truly  _ asleep _ do you think you are?" Her words made Elizabeth's skin prickle coldly. What in the hell did that mean?  
_ What? _ she half-spat, feeling her stiff jaw clench. Well...how asleep was she, really? The truth was that she couldn't exactly answer. She didn't quite know. Aside from Olga's intimidation and conscience, this felt no different from her other sleep paralysis experiences. Maybe only that she was more aware with this one, but…

Olga kicked the bed. It shoved, not by much, but Elizabeth was jostled with it. A muffled sound of surprise emitted from her throat. Her steady heartbeat had now quickened considerably--that had been solid. Perfectly solid. She shouldn't have been able to do that. Olga roughly pushed the bed a second time, and then finished crawling up onto it, crouching at its foot. There was a distinct dip that Elizabeth could feel from her weight on the mattress. She was now obscenely awake for what this was, wildly so as she stared at Olga, but still unable to move. She needed to  _ wake up _ , and now.

_Wake up._

Olga let out a weird, trilling giggle. Her dead face smiled widely at Elizabeth and it had now officially gotten under her skin. "'Wake up'," she repeated mockingly, "Do that if you wish, Miss Tanner. Your dreams are only the doorway. I'm not as tired as I once was."

_Wake up,_ Elizabeth growled at herself mentally. She squeezed her eyes shut (despite not wanting to take them off of Olga) and tried to straighten out her breathing. _Wake up, wake up._ She refused to believe that this disrespectful, insolent wisp was capable of anything more than being a looming presence in a non-corporeal world. It was strange that she could sense thoughts that Elizabeth was not projecting out, but then again, had Olga not died in an equally strange way? Who knew what was going on--Mother was probably the only one. Either way, this irritating little ghost in her bedroom needed to be gone. She had to be bluffing; she had no powers, she wasn't a witch, and she was _dead_. Dead, and that was all. Elizabeth repeated this to herself even as she forced her eyelids to stay down, as she could feel the pressure of the dancer crawling towards her, hearing the bed creak with her movements, feeling her _breath_ on her cheek.  
"Bедьма," Olga whispered, and then began to quietly chant it at her, right in her ear. "Bедьма, ведьма, ведьма…"

_ Wake up!  _ Elizabeth persisted. She shouted it in her mind, trying to say it louder than Olga, but with every attempt it seemed that more voices joined the woman on her bed. All of them chanting louder and louder,  _ ведьма! Bедьма! Bедьма!  
_ _ Wake up! Wake up! _ Elizabeth combated, trying to drown Olga out, but then seeming to be the one who was drowned out in the process. She was swarmed by voices screaming what she was at her in that vile, enraged voice. She did not stop, though; she continued her own chant, even if she had to do it quietly, underneath the sound of her guest. She would ignore Olga, ignore all of these ridiculous antics, ignore the vague threats and…

_Wake up._

Elizabeth Tanner jolted awake in a sweat. The first thing she did was suck in a deep breath and sit up, finally able to control her body again, able to move. The second immediate thing that she did was darted her eyes, and head, around the room, looking frantically for the pest, teeth bared...but there seemed to be no one. Elizabeth honed herself anyway though, she put her senses to the best of their use to gauge the room, feeling for any additional presences. Again, however, she felt nothing--just the waves left behind from her dream. That had truly been Olga, though, she knew for sure. That had been her spirit. She should probably tell the others about this in the morning...and also Mother. She needed to ask Mother about it.

Elizabeth got out of bed and went into the bathroom. She flipped on the light, looking at her tired self in the mirror. She sighed with a curl of the nose, furrowing her brows. This was so ridiculous. She bent down over the sink and splashed some water over her face, both to clean it of sweat and snap herself back into reality. She rubbed her eyes, and then wiped her face with the hand towel. She took one last look at herself, and then couldn’t help but huff a laugh. "Right," she said aloud to no one as she turned the light off again and exited the bathroom. "Just the doorway, hm? Miss Ivanova?" She looked up at the corners of her ceiling, into the shadows where Olga had previously stood. Elizabeth sneered, and made her way back over to the bed. But as she did so, she caught something out of the corner of her eye, something that made her halt frozen; it looked like a face, with a sliver of dark, wavy hair and hateful eyes. It stared at her from an impossible space, from between her bed and the side table, where nothing any bigger than a cat might be able to fit. She couldn’t see the neck. Elizabeth froze.

As if her eyes were adjusting, the face seemed to peter out, being covered up by dark blots until it was no longer visible. Elizabeth knew better than that, though. The air in her room had fallen heavy again. From behind her, very faintly, she heard a sigh.  
“Don’t you think you’ve caused enough trouble?” asked Olga.

**Author's Note:**

> whats this, shelby posting a story that takes place WELL AFTER the events of suspiria with no context?? thats right!!!!! lmfao hopefully soon i will get around to writing/posting more stuff that gives this a little bit more of an explanation, but for now heres something ive been wanting to write for some time now in regards to my continuity AU, being an exploration of the dynamic between miss tanner and olga post movie....which is that they fucking despise each other LMAO i also finally got to write my headcanon first name for tanner, give a glimpse to a vengeful, slightly more unhinged ghostly version of olga (she doesnt stay that way tho, like she does stay angry but not like....creepy)  
> but i hope yall enjoyed this, maybe soon i can also get to posting just more shit about my AU IN GENERAL, stuff about the other characters and where theyve ended up + what will happen going forward, etc etc im just super Self Conches about my writing so i honestly just kinda brace myself and charge headfirst whenever i post something LMFAO. its kind of unbeta'd, so im sorry if anything is wonky!!! i also appreciate comments if u wanna leave them btw, id love to hear ppls thoughts!!!
> 
> the inspiration for the title of this is the song Bugaboo by Dir en grey, & honestly for a movie with as soft of a soundtrack as suspiria, its wild how much an extremely heavy metal band inspires me when i write


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